Green groups pine for bill

Moderates don’t like cap and trade. Republicans question climate change. And even some liberal Democrats say there’s little chance for a climate bill to pass the Senate this year.

Still, environmentalists and their supporters in Congress, who have spent a decade pushing for cap and trade, aren’t giving up.

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“These are the dumb D.C. rumors that too often mark this city and are rendered meaningless on a daily basis,” said Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who’s carrying the climate legislation in the Senate. “We can cross the finish line this year.”

Senate supporters will kick off a new round of meetings on the legislation shortly after returning to Washington next week. Environmental advocates plan a barrage of ads, bus tours and lobbying starting as early as this week. And outside Washington, climate activists plan to flood Senate offices with calls pushing for action.

“Reports of the demise of climate legislation have been greatly exaggerated,” said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute.

But environment groups and their business allies realize that they are now fighting for the very core of the bill: a cap on greenhouse gas pollution. And they’re ready to hold President Barack Obama accountable for his campaign promises to create a system that would curb the greenhouse gases responsible for climate change.

“There needs to be a comprehensive bill, not an energy-only bill,” said the Sierra Club’s Josh Dorner. “We’ve been down that road several times before, and it’s really time for Congress to get behind a comprehensive bill.”

Lash puts it even more strongly: “Passing an energy-only bill would be a failure.”

Environmental organizations are already pushing to grab coveted airtime in the president’s State of the Union address in the next several weeks. Ideally, they’d like a public promise that passing a climate bill will remain a top priority this year — even as the battered economy and the loss of jobs dominate a congressional agenda that still includes health care reform.

“We are expecting this to stay as a high priority for this year,” said Michael Oko, spokesman for Clean Energy Works, a coalition of environmental, labor, religious and veterans groups lobbying for the climate bill. Prospects for Senate passage of the legislation — already approved by the House last summer — have dimmed in recent months, with the bruising health care debate and looming midterm elections.

Last month was particularly brutal, as environmental advocates fended off criticism of climate negotiations in Copenhagen that failed to produce a strong international agreement.

Even some supporters now publicly doubt that the bill will get done this year. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) told The Associated Press last week that passage of the legislation was unlikely.

And Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell, a Democrat, called the bill “impossible to pass” in an interview with POLITICO.